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After the bright green of my St. Paddy’s Day manicure, I needed my next design to be toned down to balance things out. I’ve seen a few other examples of white stamping over nude colored nails and decided that would be the perfect combination of subtle yet playful I was craving…also, I have a meeting coming up at work so super jazzy nails wouldn’t cut it (even though my bosses love my nail art for meetings with visitors I like to tone things down).

I’m really pleased with how the designed came out. The Sephora by OPI Bare To Be Different polish was very translucent. The first coat was so clear that I decided to switch to Milani Creme Brulee for the second coat. On my ring finger I used Sally Hansen Nail Prisms South Sea Pearl, which is a duochrome (color shifting) topcoat, but it didn’t photograph well. The color adds a green shimmer that can shift to pink depending on the lighting, but the photo just shows glare :\. Apparently it also looks fantastic over black, so I’ll share when I attempt that.

The stamping plate is QA65 from BornPrettyStore.com, which I got on sale for only 99 cents, regular price is $2.99, but keep an eye out because they regularly have amazing sales. The plate stamped clean and all of the images are great designs, I can’t wait to try the others. As you can see in the photo my nails are currently short, the images were large enough to cover my nails, one of my thumbs I had to double stamp for full coverage. If you have long nails you will probably need to double stamp with these images which are under an inch long.

Originally, my ring finger was just going to have a single diamond pattern, but since I stamped it on my nail REALLY off-center I decided to just stamp it all around and make a pattern. As Bob Ross would say, there are no mistakes, just happy little accidents. Or as I would say, it’s a mistake, but also an opportunity to get creative!

Either way I love it! I think the stamped pattern would also look really pretty in green with little flowers added or stamped and staggered in two different colors. Have you tried stamping over nude? How’d it turn out?

The stamping plate has 7 different little characters on it – bunny, kitty, teddy bear, chick, panda, giraffe and the seventh is what I like to call the “mystery animal”; I think it’s a sheep? My confusion lies in the fact that what would appear to be horns and ears look more like two sets of ears – I think it’s a cute character either way, but would love to hear your guesses!

I started out with a different color on each nail, all topped with the beautiful, glittery, pearlescent Ulta Diva (I love putting this over a bunch of different colored nails because it ties them all together and makes them look a little more pastel).

Each nail is also stamped with a different color, none of them are made specifically for stamping. I used a combination of thick quick-dry polishes and thinner shimmers to see how both turned out.

The thin outline images on the plate (the chick, bunny, kitty, panda and mystery animal sheep thing) seemed to work better with the thin nail polishes. When I tried to use the insta-dri polishes on the thin outline images they didn’t transfer well; I think this is because the lines are so fine that the thick polish dried almost instantly. The Insta-Dri polish worked great on the bear (which doesn’t have thin lines) and pretty well on the giraffe where there are big spaces for polish to fill.

On a side note I’m really happy that I picked up the Poshe Top Coat, it’s very similar to Seche Vite, but without the toulene. It didn’t smear the polish underneath, not much shrinkage and no chipping as of day 3. Much better than the Orly Top Coat I recently purchased!

If you get anything from their online store use the code EAG10 for a 10% discount.